Overall this module aims to extend the students awareness of their place within the field of professional therapeutic care and practice, developing knowledge of alternative approaches and extending their awareness about employability and career development in this sector.
This module will introduce students to ways of approaching their own employability. Students will initially reflect upon their current career position and explore their future career goals through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, motivational psychology and positive psychology. In addition to a reflective and theoretical approach to understanding employability, students will also adopt a pragmatic approach by directly engaging with a range of different professionals relevant to their degree subject. To complement a growing orientation to the world of work, students will learn about the wider context of the graduate labour market, in particular statistics, trends and routes into different professions.
The latter half of the module broadens students awareness of alternative therapeutic interventions. As such it covers a range of modern theories and applications to therapeutic practice other than psychodynamic. It will provide basic underpinning ideas and orientation to enable students to be more professionally aware of the field in which they practice and it will support their capacity to understand, communicate and work effectively with other professionals. Students will read about five different approaches and hear presentations about their underpinning theory and how this is expressed in practice.
Aims
1 To encourage students to consider their own career development
2 To examine the current and classic employability theory and research, and how this links conceptually with psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to wider citizenship and human development
3 To gain a deeper understanding of the graduate labour market and how to skilfully navigate a path through it
4 To critically reflect upon how theory, practical knowledge and experience informs career and self-development
5 To bring to students the awareness of other orientations to facilitate constructive relationships with other services
6 To enable students to understand where psychodynamic thinking is situated in a wider range of approaches
7 To lay the foundations for students to be able to make informed judgements as to what is the most appropriate intervention in particular cases
Learning Outcomes
At the end of the module students should be able to
a) Discuss how psychoanalytic, psychological and vocational theory relates to employability.
b) Discuss sections of the graduate labour market that are relevant to a career of interest
c) Reflect on theory, job market knowledge and self to inform career choice
d) Understand and discuss non-psychodynamic therapeutic approaches
e) Acknowledge the relationships between psychodynamic and other methodological approaches
f) Have sufficient knowledge and respect of other orientations to support constructive professional networking
- Module Supervisor: Deborah Wright